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Somewhere in the bowels of the Department of Health
and Human Services someone ought to start work on a
smoking commercial.

Not an anti-smoking
commercial. Something to present
smoking, shortness of breath and
lung cancer in a positive, even
genial, light. It's in the national
interest.

Specifically, it's in the interest
of all the states that shared in the
windfall of the tobacco settlement
that showered billions on the states
to spend on things dear to the
hearts of governors and state
legislators.

The little secret, as dirty as any
ashtray and never to be addressed
in public, is that the states have a crucial interest not in
stopping smoking, but in encouraging smoking. Who can
doubt that the states eventually will? If something happens to
the tobacco companies, all those billions go the way of the
butt and the stogie.

The California jury that last week awarded $28 billion -
that's billion, not million - to a terminally ill woman who is a
lifelong smoker took 5 percent of the value of Philip Morris,
as measured by its falling share price on the New York Stock
Exchange, off the books in the single day.

Nearly all of the award to Betty Bullock, 64, of Los
Angeles, who is not expected to live long enough to get any
of the money, is for punitive damages, and an appeals court is
almost certain to reduce it, probably dramatically. Still, she is
to receive more than a million dollars in actual damages. She
probably won't live long enough to get any of that, either. But
her lawyers will. Judges, who can be very hard on common
thieves, often share the thief's disregard for the money of
others.

Mrs. Bullock's lawyer says she is "happy that she has
survived long enough to see justice." The lawyer takes
consolation in the fact that his cut runs into the billions of
dollars. He will send a nice bunch of flowers to the funeral.

Mrs. Bullock's illness is sad in human terms, of course, but
hers is a story of willful defiance of the risks she began taking
when she was a teenage girl in South Dakota. Her daughter,
as a small child, begged her to quit because her mother
"smelled bad" and the house smelled "icky." One of the
lawyers for Philip Morris asked Mrs. Bullock during
cross-examination whether she had ever heard that smoking
was dangerous.

"I would read the little clip in the paper here or there," she
said. "Some medical studies were stating that they felt it
could. But then I'd see things Philip Morris would say, like
'that's just statistics, there is no medical proof. Our No. 1
concern is our customers, and we protect their health,' and
there wasn't any risk."

Naturally, Mrs. Bullock believed the fine print from the
dirty rotten company, not her own hacking cough. For their
part, the Philip Morris lawyers will appeal, and argue that the
jury should have considered whether Mrs. Bullock knew of
the dangers of cigarets (which have been called "coffin nails"
for a hundred years) and should have taken responsibility for
her lifestyle.

But surely the lawyers jest. To suggest that anyone should
take personal responsibility is at least insensitive, and
probably un-American. We don't do personal responsibility
any more. Everything bad that happens is someone else's
fault. It's in the Constitution.

The tobacco companies are, in fact, dirty rotten exploiters
of human weakness. They deserve no sympathy from the rest
of us. But the men and women of government, responsible for
enforcing public policy, can't be bamboozled by mere
sentiment. The governors and the legislators have taken the
money, allocated it for crucial government services, and they
have to protect the source of funding. Even the D.C. Council
couldn't put enough meter maids on the streets to write the
tickets to make up a tobacco shortfall.

Thus a campaign to impress on young people a patriotic
duty to smoke is a necessity. Good citizens owe it to their
country. Clever television commercials could get across the
point that since we all have to die of something, smokers
might die of something else before the bitter weed gets them.
The camera could cut to a car careering off a cliff, for
example, and just before impact the driver says: "Gee, if I had
known I was going to die like this, I never would have given
up my Lucky Strikes."

Such a campaign will require a large measure of cynicism,
but cynicism was invented by government. The feds promote
"safe sex" when it knows that some forms of sex, particularly
the peculiar kind favored in fashionable gay precincts, are
never safe. The surgeon general would never condemn this in
the way surgeon generals condemn the practice of ingesting
poison at the north end of the alimentary canal.

Tommy Thompson must get someone to work at once,
before greedy lawyers, compliant judges and ignorant juries
wipe out the cash we need to keep our bureaucracies fat and
sassy.